A variety of fundraising techniques have been developed for encouraging the donation of money, time and/or services to a charitable cause. One fundraising method that has been widely used in, for example, fundraising efforts for school programs, has enlisted direct product sales efforts by school children, typically with a percentage of the sales being given to the fundraising organization, and the remaining portion to the sponsoring product merchants.
While such conventional fundraising efforts have generated modest success in the past, direct sales techniques are becoming decreasingly popular for a host of reasons. For example, several states have enacted legislation limiting the type and volume of products being sold by school children. Other states have prohibited students from participating in school fund raisers that offer incentives, prizes, or awards based on the amount of money raised. In addition, concerns have been raised regarding the safety of promoting door-to-door sales by school children. Moreover, typical direct sales approaches inspire a relatively small proportion of the members of the fundraising organization to actually conduct direct sales efforts.
As indicated above, existing fundraising techniques rely greatly upon the ability of the technique to encourage participation by the individuals conducting the fundraising efforts. In most conventional fundraising programs, the fundraising member must seek out and solicit third parties as potential donors or product purchasers, with many of such third parties potentially being previously unknown to the fundraising member. Such third party contact can often be a sufficient hurdle that minimizes potential charitable donations.
In addition, there exists a need for obtaining targeted marketing information on certain consumers. Such targeted marketing information greatly assists merchants in focusing marketing resources to only interested sets of consumers. At present, however, it is difficult to solicit such information from consumers, and particularly solicit such information in connection with particular goods that the respective consumer is interested in.
It is therefore a principle object of the present invention to provide a fundraising program that minimizes barriers to participation by fundraising organization members.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a promotional program that provides incentives to consumers to register for one or more gift registries in exchange for certain personal and/or consumer preference information.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a fundraising program that eliminates the need for direct sales to be performed by the fundraising organization members.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide a fundraising program that maintains the privacy of fundraising organization member identities, at least until such members voluntarily participate in the fundraising program.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a fundraising program that automatically builds a database of information for marketing use by the respective merchants participating in the fundraising program.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide a fundraising program that introduces and encourages the use of gift registries operated by the respective merchants participating in the fundraising program.